With the introduction of consumer-owned/home-installed femtocell access points (FAP), power failures may have a severe impact on wireless service operations as home-installed FAPs do not have the luxury of power back-ups that regular macrocell transmitter systems have. If unable to connect to the mobile network infrastructure through FAPs (due to a disruptive event such as a power failure), the customer devices (e.g., cell phones) attempt to switch their over-the-air connections to those served by macrocells, so as to maintain the active connection (i.e., vertical handoff for active communication sessions) or to simply notify the cellular service provider of the change in their “points of attachment” (i.e., location update by inactive devices). Similar procedures would occur, in the reverse way, upon the restoration of the femtocell connection.
Hence, upon power failure, and later on upon recovery, there is a flood of actions required by the customer devices (e.g., cell phones) originally serviced by the FAPs and later on the FAPs that come back to live at the same time. Such situations can stress back-end operations trying to process a flood of requests (e.g., for reconfiguration or phone handoffs).
There currently exists no teaching directed to dealing with the impact of femtocell related-operations due to power loss and recovery. Thus, techniques for femtocell recovery following a disruptive event such as a power failure would be desirable.